RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SECONDARY EDUCATION

3^RD

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

THEME:

PROMOTING STEAM EDUCATION THROUGH RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE

TOPIC:

RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SECONDARY EDUCATION

ALOZIE EUGENE IHEANYI

17/PG/PhD/Edu-Tech/5772

GREGORY UNIVERSITY, UTURU

ABIA STATE

DATE: 08/11/2023

Abstract

This paper examines the idea of promoting Steam Education through research and innovation in the digital age. Its attention is on research and innovation in Secondary education. It has a comprehensive review of 14 studies which revealed a lot of key themes like: Steam Education as varied from Stem, Edtech and Steam as an innovative research, Flipped Classroom and Steam learning. The study concludes that flipped classroom is a vast active learning experience that can leverage the expected impact of Steam education on the 21^st century students. Keywords: Steam Education, Edtech, and Flipped Classroom.

Introduction

The world is large and life itself is complex. So, education (Rufai,2014), as an effective means of developing the full capacities and potentials of the human resource”, cannot achieve its objective if teachers continue to teach students with a unidirectional curriculum like STEM. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

What is meant here is that though the educational curriculum needs to be selective, it also needs to be comprehensive. Educational Technology is able to do its work as a potent problem solving educational tool because it is characteristically eclectic. This implies that EdTech is open to accept ideas and becomes an interdisciplinary science.

In general, this work is of the view that no single learning experience or subject can answer all the questions of the human person; especially as life becomes more complex in this digital age. This is why STEAM education has become necessary for our students and comes to us through research as a timely educational innovation. Evidently, STEAM is more comprehensive than STEM.

An online document on STEAM education (n.d), says that it is “an approach to learning that uses Science, Technology, Engineering, the Art and Mathematics as access point for guiding students’ enquiry, dialogue and critical thinking”.

Teaching a child with STEM curriculum alone is like teaching only in view of the workforce, without considering the child as a human person. At a secondary school level, the student requires a strong comprehensive and diversified curriculum that will give a strong foundation required to establish and stabilize the learner as a human being preparing to live in the 21st century environment. Such comprehensive STEAM curriculum will also require to anchor on a dynamic instructional technique which can elicit the powers in STEAM education and impact beneficially on both the students and the society of our digital age.

STEAM: A Practical Experience

Last two years, in an educational expedition, I met a secondary school superintendent who told all his Arts students to remain in class whenever the science students had lessons, which was contrary to tradition. I pondered over it for a while and felt that something was at the offing. I could not wait. Immediately, I climbed up to the apartment of the school Principal to ask why. The explanation I got for such innovative school initiative sparked off a fire of information in me, which I prefer to describe as unforgettable. The issue is that the world is so vast and complex that teaching science to students, totally apart from Art in secondary school, remains a big question mark, over the efficiency of curriculum implementation today.

The Link Between Art, Science And Technology

There is no such effective education where only art offers what the learner requires to live in the world. At the same time there is no such effective learning where science alone offers what is expected for a balanced life in a young school leaver. While science tries to understand the world as method, observations, experimentation and analytic process there is always need for that effective communication skills and powers of self-expression which only art offers abundantly. More so, in this digital age, we have many cases where artists are now employing the computer science technology to produce very awesome digital artworks. As Ayushi (n.d:1) has put it,

Overall, even if art and science have different methods and objectives they both have significant social contributions to make and when combined can enhance one another.

EDTECH AND STEAM EDUCATION

Looking at the afore-said, Educational Technology as the potent educational tool that resolves problems inherent in teaching and learning, has recently evolved STEAM education as a remedy to clear gaps. This is because the clear-cut separation of STEAM from Arts has caused a wide gap in education both in Africa and beyond. At the three levels of curriculum development – macro, meso and micro level, these problems are noticed clearly in our traditional instructional design. In Nigeria and beyond, schooling loses its value as students finish and cannot get a job commensurate to the energy and resources expended in education.

It is evident that many people finish secondary education and continue to stagger about because they are not sure of the next step forward or what to do next in life. Apart from those who go straight to the University, a good number who finish secondary education remain stagnant and confused almost until those who were in JSS III when they were in school, come out of school as well. What it means is that the traditional curriculum and teaching methods are far away from the realities on ground. This should not be so because, school is noted as the microcosm of the society. Looking at these challenges, Medvisit (2020) noted that “ clearly there is something missing in our world which are: communication, understanding, tolerance and emotional education”. Amid these outcries to fill the yawning gaps, some educationists admit that the needs of our school children in this 21st century are similar the above catalogue of needs. In addition to that, the required 4cs of the 21st century education are noted to include: collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and communication. In an online document on STEAM Education(n.d:2), the educator said , “They are critical components to students’ success in a rapidly changing workforce and society. Luckily these are easily woven into quality STEAM lessons” .

Such quality STEAM lesson of the 21st century seems to be better unearthed and elicited in a very tactical and dynamic instructional technique known as the flipped classroom.

According to Trach (2023:2),

The flipped classroom is a blended learning model in which traditional ideas about classroom activities and homework are reverted or flipped. In this model, instructors have students interact with new material for homework first. They then use class time to discuss the new information and put those ideas into practice.

It is like saying that a STEAM education absolutely requires an up to date instructional technique to leverage its quality impact. No doubt the flipped classroom is a powerful teaching technique that draws force from the age-old theory of Constructivism of John Dewey and Brunner. According to them, “constructivism is a learning theory that says that people try to construct their own ideas through experiencing things and having a reflection over the experience they have had. In a digital document captioned “Concept to Classroom” (2023), it was made clear that in constructivism, When we encounter something new, we begin to try to reconcile it with the previous ideas. If it works out well, we may eventually adjust or change what we believed previously or even discard the new idea if it lacks relevance in our lives”. In order to do this, we must engage in active thinking of asking questions, try to explore, and access what we know.

In a constructivist classroom, teachers encourage students to constantly access how the activity is helping them gain understanding. By questioning themselves and their strategies, students in the constructivist classroom ideally become expert learners. This gives them the over broadening tools to keep learning. And with a well planned classroom environment like the flipped classroom, the students also learn how to learn.

In the same deep document of high learning called “Concept to Classroom( 2023), It is said that constructivist teachers pose questions and problems and then guide the student to help them find their own answers. So they use many techniques in the teaching process. For example, in such a classroom teachers may do the following:

Prompt students to formulate their own questions (inquiry)

Allow multiple interpretations and expressions (multiple )

Encourage group work and the use of peers as resources (collaborative learning)

All the aforesaid active classroom activities paint a picture of what is called a flipped learning. According to Arfstrom (2021:3),

Flapped learning is a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter.

Flipped learning is a segment of the teaching technique called flipped classroom which was originated by Jon Bergmann of Woodland Park High School, USA. It is a blended learning model that combines the digital delivery of contents (asynchronous), with the face to face individual encounter (synchronous) with the learner, in order to bring him or her to the mastery model or stage of the learning subject.

In this case of flipped learning in STEAM education, the teacher becomes the facilitator and a guide and not a sage on the stage. Flipped classroom has been acclaimed as a powerful learner-centred technique of teaching and has become a very result effective instructional technique. With its turnaround from the traditional one cap fits all soloed education, this paper advocates that flipped classroom is a possible and effective instructional technique for STEAM education in secondary schools and k-12 education. The flipped classroom has such a dynamic and diversified instructional design whose efficacy and flexibility will prove potent in a STEAM learning that will impact on our modern education as whole. According to Panopto (2022), the flipped classroom has the dynamic activities of learning through which it can satisfy the needs of both the learner and society. And this work posits that such infinite possibilities of the flipped classroom technique is highly related to the objectives of the STEAM education. This is because, flipped classroom could be called a standard inverted classroom where the concepts are digitally presented in videos, while the in-class time is reserved for practicing the concepts. It can take the form of a micro flipped classroom when short videos are used to free up an elongated class time for practice. It can be discussion oriented, when after watching the videos, the in-class time is used to explore and for valued discussion. Flipped classroom can be demonstration-based, when after digital consumptions at home, class time is used for practical demonstrations. Flipped classroom can be faux when after watching the video in school, a guided interaction is used as a tool to clarify all doubts. It can be called group-based, when after the digital consumption, group learning is chosen afterwards to further clarifications and improve retention. Again flipped classroom can be virtual, when the learning management system (LMS) is used both for the content presentation and for assignments and guidance. The flipped classroom be called flipping the teacher, when students make their own videos and send to the teacher to show understanding. All these are the diverse models of the flipped classroom which touch on the absolute flexibility of this pedagogy and on the infinite possibilities of its instructional designs, in order to meet the diverse learning styles and effect an efficient curriculum implementation, targeted in STEAM education. It must be added that the flipped classroom is a high technology in education because it makes people to learn through technology and must emphasize the instructional factum that media design is part and parcel of instructional design, especially in STEAM education.

STEAM AS INNOVATIVE EDUCATION

Secondary education has been beset by so many instructional challenges which result to societal problems. Loss of interest in schooling has grown in Nigeria and other places as schooling seems to lose relevance. As mentioned earlier, those who finish secondary school in Nigeria find it difficult to get fixed up in life or have a life they cherish. Those who move forward the University education experience job scarcity afterwards and lack of fulfilment, which lead to rampant search for for visas to travel abroad. In Europe and America the stories are not too exciting, as animation, robotics and artificial intelligence take over many workplaces leaving many unemployed at times. All these call for more need for innovation and better creativities in the educational enterprise.

According to Nasseri and Vichos (2021:3).

A radical change approach is recommended. Increasingly students will need to be able to respond to a job market that values creativity, collaborations, social intelligence and empathy, the teaching pedagogy of constructivism and STEAM are evidence based methodologies that may offer a higher success rate in meeting existential challenges of the climate change.

As mentioned earlier, the flipped classroom is a likely the pedagogical approach, up to date in efficacy, which can liberate the world from this quagmire of educational drawbacks, through STEAM learning. Flipped Classroom is a veritable toolkit for STEAM education especially in secondary schools. It is a potent constructivist approach which when combined with an accurate design thinking procedures will leverage on education meaningfully. Some Educators agree that a design thinking process is a set of structured strategies that can identify challenges, gather information, generate potential solutions, refine ideas and test solutions. It builds a creative and innovative mind-set in the student. As Shulman (2018:4) said, design innovative thinking pattern has five phases which both students and teachers can follow in the classroom:

I have a challenge, how do I approach it?
I learned something now, how do I interpret it?
I see an opportunity, what can I create?
I have an idea. How can I build it?
I tried something new. How do I make it evolve?

The flipped learning is such a great pedagogical approach that turns the Blooms’ Taxonomy upside down putting “to create” at the epicentre of every learning experience. It is a good and fertile ground to foster the spirit of innovation, design thinking and creativity in the child. A mind-set that has the power to learn and to create through STEAM education can face the challenges of our time.

Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) in STEAM Education

The Flipped classroom is one instructional technique that places the challenge-based learning at the forefront, and this will favour STEAM education. According to Lockwood (2023), challenge-based learning(CBL) is practiced when teachers challenge students to solve a specific open ended problem. It is a part of problem based learning(PBL), which includes introducing students to a big idea, asking them the essential question or questions (EQ), on a topic and presenting students with a challenge to solve. As Lockwood (2022:1) said,

Many researchers have demonstrated that in CBL, students are more motivated at a deeper level of learning with increased collaborations which showed learning experiences, positive attitude increase in class, and the practice of using a growth mind-set. Those researches on CBL are more related to improving STEAM education than the traditional school education.

STEAM EDUCATION AND STUDENTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF LIFE.

While the entire world complains of child delinquency and student tantrums, it is important to note that STEAM education could be the solution. This work proposes such type of STEAM that can happens in a flipped classroom. Flipped learning as a classic example of Progressive Education makes students learn by doing and are encouraged to make sense of the world around them by entering it and engaging with it.

An online document on Progressive education(n.d:3 ) says it better,

Through deep connections with teachers and peers, children develop an appreciation for human differences that enable them to work collaboratively and effectively, towards common solutions to shared challenge.

This work is of the opinion that with such deep seated inter-disciplinary STEAM education anchored on the virile teaching technique as the flipped classroom, which considers growth mind-set and emotional intelligence; there would be a great and favourable change in education. This is because the meaning of life and success will expand for the human person, at one and the same time when the labour markets will become more viable. Invariably there will be a possible decrease in the rate of wickedness on earth as life becomes more and more meaningful for many. Thus, there will be a true accountability in education.

Conclusion

Many years ago, President Abraham Lincoln may have envisioned the negative effects of the separate handling of STEM and Art subjects, and so he chose to write a memorable letter to the teacher of his child. No doubt Abraham Lincoln was in quest for a more comprehensive learning like in STEAM education. He wrote, indicating that more subjects should have been included in the curriculum of his child as recorded thus; Team( 2021:1),

Teach him to learn to lose and also to enjoy winning. Teach him to have faith in his own ideas, even if everyone tells him that they are wrong. Teach him to listen to all men, but teach him also to filter all that he learnt on a screen of truth, and take only the good that comes through.

The issues on ground here is that a straightjacket type of learning cannot suffice again because of the complexity of life and the world. According to Nasseri and Vichos(2021),using a meta analysis, they said that today’s education should work out designing a curricular informed by latest research, engage learners in research-based activities and still encourage creativity or creative thinking. It should build learning communities that foster inclusive learning environments that are active, blended, where teachers and students work as collaborators or partner.

Finally, the case of the child of Abraham Lincoln could be the same case with all our students today. So, while what the child requires to have faith in his ideas may come from art, what he/she requires the filter the varieties of what he/she observes may come from the sciences. It is like saying, while what he/she requires to have a positive mind-set for a meaningful courageous life is found within the arts, he/she requires the STEM subjects to find real, technological solutions to his many day to day dilemmas. Hence this work advocates that STEAM education found through the flipped classroom technique is richer than mere Art or pure STEM learning, especially for our secondary school students. STEAM education is more comprehensive and better for our students; to enable them do well in the workplace and still have a better understanding of themselves and a meaningful life in general.

Refe rences

Arfistrom, K.M. (2021). An introduction to flipped learning. Retrieved from Lesley.edu.article/,on 5/11/2023

Ayushi (n.d). What is the Relationship of Art and Science and Technology? Retrieved from medium.com/, on 2/11/23.

Concept to Classroom Construction As paradigm to Teaching and Learning(2014). Retrieved from thirteen.org.endol ine/, on 1/11/2023.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education. New York, NY: Collies

Lockwood .D. (2023). Challenge Based learning & steam Curriculum. Retrieved from scholarship.claremont. edu/, On 30/10/23.

Medivisit (2020). Technology in Schools. Retrieved from medvisit.io/, on 6/1/2023

Nasseri D. & Vichos .R. (2021). Construction and STEAM, working with learners as partners to explore perceptions and attitudes towards innovative pedagogies. Retrieved from pure.sruc.uk/, on 28/10/23

Panopt o (2022). 7 Unique Flipped Classroom Models which are Best for you. Retrieved from Panopto.com/on 21/11/2023

Rufai, A.R. (2023). Federal Republic of Nigeria, National Policy on Education, Nigeria; NCRDC press.

Shulman, D.R. (2018). 10 Ways Educators Can Make Classrooms More Innovative. Retrieved from www. Forbes.com/on 2/11/23

Team (2021). A must Read letter Written by Abraham Lincolyn to His son’s teacher. Retrieved from www. Heritage times on 3/11/23

Trach (2023). A beginner’s Guide to flipped Classroom. Retrieved from www. Schoology.com/,on 3/11/23

What is Progressive education (n.d). Retrieved from school.bank.streets.edu/, on 1/11/23

What is STEAM Education?, The definitive Guide For k-12 Schools.(n.d) Retrieved from www.artsintegration.com/, on 03/11/2023